THE Friday Boys are a disparate group of men spread across Tyneside who meet once a week - 'always on a Friday' - to talk about the arts, raise a glass to recently departed heroes and villains and, at the evening's end, down a whisky or two. The FBs have only one golden rule - talk of the working week is strictly off-limit.

Monday, 24 January 2011

The Ten Best Woody Allen

Here's his own choice of six from New York Magazine, as of June 2010:

Woody Allen’s Six Favorite Woody Allen Movies6/25/10 at 3:45 PM

Proof again that artists have no business judging their own material: "There are a few better than others, half a dozen, but it’s a surprising paucity of worthwhile celluloid," says Woody Allen of his own movies in a delightfully depressing London Times interview today. His six favorites: Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

At the risk of having him accost me, McLuhan-like, for telling him what I think is his best, here are my top ten Woody films, in no particular order (which you should know by now):

ManhattanAnnie HallCrimes and MisdemeanoursTake the Money and RunHannah and her SistersManhattan Murder MysteryRadio DaysDeconstructing HarryBullets over BroadwayZelig*

*or maybe Mighty Aphrodite or, to be obtuse, Shadows and Fog...

Not that I'm not partial to the (other) earlier, funny films, like Love and Death, and it's easy to find considerable merit with the later works, after the press fell out of love with him. I also enjoy Martin Ritt's The Front and Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat. The latter may degenerate into farce for the last 10-15 minutes, but the rest is a pretty accurate portrayal of the life of one of the founding fathers of the FNB. And, like Woody, he's still going.